


Ferry, Cross The Mersey

by Cerusee



Category: Superman (Comics), Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, I APOLOGIZE, it slowly devolved into My Thoughts On Superman in dialogue form, this was supposed to be a scene with Lois dealing with this ‘Clark is Superman’ thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 02:34:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14534811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerusee/pseuds/Cerusee
Summary: They were a good forty minutes into the drive before Lois finally asked, “Why are we driving to Gotham?”“That’s where the story is, Lois,”  Clark said.  “I’m pretty sure I mentioned that part.”“That, I got.  But why are we…drivingto Gotham?”





	Ferry, Cross The Mersey

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally a scene in an as-yet unpublished [chapter of Verdant](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13477911/chapters/35193824) [edit: now published], but which I slowly realized does not belong in that story. I was too fond of it to scrap it entirely, though, so here, have a Lois and Clark short.

They were a good forty minutes into the drive before Lois finally asked, “Why are we driving to Gotham?”

“That’s where the story is, Lois,” Clark said. “I’m pretty sure I mentioned that part.”

“That, I got. But why are we… _driving_ to Gotham?”

“This one is on the record, Lois. Everything on the up-and-up.”

“It’s just for appearances sake, then?” she said dryly.

Clark glanced at her with a small smile. “It’s not _just_ about appearances.”

“You’re _Superman_ , Clark!” Lois said. “You can be anywhere! You can do anything! Why are you spending two hours driving me to Gotham, when you could be out saving god knows how many lives right now?”

Clark’s jaw tightened in a way she’d never seen before—not on _Clark_ , but she had seen it on Superman—and he abruptly shifted to the right lane, and then pulled over onto the shoulder. “Hold on,” he said, sharply.

The next moment, Clark was gone.

Lois sat in the car for twenty slow-crawling minutes, feeling colder and colder each minute, even though it was August in New Jersey. Just when she was about to move over into the driver’s seat herself, there was a rush of air, and he was back, hunching over the wheel, starting the engine again, and pulling them back onto the highway.

“What the hell was _that_ ,” she said, her voice tight and cold.

“I was saving lives,” he said, sharply. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

They were silent for a bit.

“All those times you just vanished on me—”

“Almost every time,” Clark said. “Almost every time, it was because I heard someone calling out for help and that mattered more than what I was doing when I heard it.”

“Was it worth it?” She couldn’t help how soft her voice went, asking that.

“Almost every time,” he said, quietly.

Lois chewed on that for a little while. 

“How do you decide?” she eventually asked. “When to be you, and when to be… _him?_ ”

“Well.” Clark’s mouth twisted. “I told you about my folks, right?”

“Sure,” Lois said, trying to remember everything Clark had mentioned about his parents. “They have a farm in Kansas, right?”

“That’s right. I grew up there.”

“Grew up?” Oh. Oh, _shit_. Lois never had managed to nail down exactly _when_ Superman had come to Earth. “Does that mean—”

“That’s right,” Clark said. “I was just a baby when Krypton blew up. The pod I came here landed in on the wheatfields—Pa said it tore up the field pretty good, but that they reckoned it was a fair trade, one field of wheat gone the same day God gave them the baby they’d always wanted. _I_ didn’t even know I wasn’t human, until I was older. They told me as soon as they thought I could understand, though. They had to. It was the right thing to do, and I was already starting to...be different.”

“What was it like, back then?” she asked, fascinated by the thought of a kid-Superman. A Superteen. _Superboy_. “Were you just...hiding? Did you secretly zoom around Kansas, finding days to save?”

“Back then it was mostly hiding. Sometimes I’d make bold breaks.” He laughed. “There are a lot recorded acts of God in the region dating back to my teenage years. Pa and Ma used to get so exasperated with me.”

“Do they not approve of Superman?”

Clark blew out a breath and said, slowly, “It’s complicated. It’s not that they don’t approve. They were mostly worried what would happen if someone caught me doing things no ordinary human could do, if someone figured out what I was. Once I had the suit, and a whole alternate persona, they relaxed about it.” He glanced over at her and grinned. “Ma’s started collecting press clippings and putting them into scrapbooks. She likes your articles.”

“When _did_ you decide to actually become Superman?”

“After I moved to Metropolis. The city was so much louder than Kansas. Busier.” 

That wasn’t exactly an uncommon sentiment from people who moved to Metropolis from somewhere less urban, she thought, but probably truer for him than for the people who didn’t have superhearing.

“There was so much more _need_ , all around me. Back in Kansas, I could run around righting tipped-over tractors and digging out collapsed irrigation channels and go home at the end of the day, but in Metropolis, I realized...it was going to take a lot more. And I’m fast, but I realized if I kept running out to save people all the time, sooner or later, someone was going to get a good look at me. They’d figure out who I was, what I was. And then my life would blow up, and so would my folks. I’m pretty sure the State Department would have questions for the farm couple who found an alien artifact with a life form in it and didn’t tell anybody about it. So—I put together the flashiest, most distracting suit I could come up with, and…” Clark shrugged. “You know the rest.”

She did. She’d been the one who coined the name, after all.

“But once I was Superman, as well as Clark—it takes up so much of my time, even with superspeed. There are _always_ people who need help, somewhere. First it was just Metropolis. Then it was the whole northeast corridor. Then North America. Then it was _everywhere_.”

Lois remembered when Clark had first joined the Planet. Kind of a hotshot, which she liked, with an instinct for where trouble was about to erupt. He could _write_ , too, well enough that every now and again, she’d read one of his pieces and feel a twinge of jealousy, that he’d written that paragraph and she hadn’t.

But almost as soon as he’d been hired, he’d starting having unexplained absences. Meetings skipped without warning, or adequate excuse. He never missed met his deadlines, but people figured out fast you couldn’t count on Clark to meet you for lunch. His work was _damn_ good; he’d have been fired that first year, if it wasn’t. Journalism forgave a lot, if you could deliver solid stories on deadline.

“At some point, I realized I _had_ to carve out time to just...be Clark. Do Clark things. Read a book. Go home and have dinner with my folks.”

“Drive somewhere with a co-worker,” Lois said, “even though you could have flown the both of you.”

“Drive somewhere with a _friend_ ,” Clark corrected her with a smile.

“A friend,” Lois agreed, smiling back at him. “Good to have those. Which reminds me, did I tell you what Jimmy said to me yesterday, after you bailed…”


End file.
